The Fundamental Loneliness
by speckledears
Summary: Kira had heard time and time again of the cliche that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes at maximum speed; in his case, images of hands permeated his thoughts.


Everything happened too suddenly. In the span for a few seconds, it felt as if the universe had ended and restarted itself a multitude of times. There was no place for judgement. A man that the two sailors didn't know was on the boat, and this man was saying something to Josefumi. Kira was unable to read the stranger's lips; they appeared to be foreign and otherworldly. The more they moved, the more unnatural they became, as if the man were speaking some language that the human mind could not comprehend. When Kira saw Josefumi's reaction to the stranger's words, it fell into place that Kira could not hear a thing. The ocean and its splashing against the boat, the wind and its whispers of pleasantries to sailors, the birds and their calling for lovers. Kira was incapable of hearing anything aside from a growing static sound that rooted itself into the base of his skull. He felt his body move on its own, saying things that he could no longer tangibly confirm and performing actions that he wasn't aware of—his stand touching something smooth and Kira's thumb pressing down. The static noise grew so strongly that it manifested into a physical lump in Kira's body. It was the feeling of numbness, lost, confusion all creating a true, tangible pain. He touched the point of pain, finding chunks of wood lodged into the neck and skull as blood seeped through the wounds. It occurred to Kira that he was most likely dying, and that the amount of blood he was losing was sure to be the puncher for his one-way ticket to death.

Kira had heard time and time again of the cliche that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes at maximum speed; in his case, images of hands permeated his thoughts. His mom's were the first he saw, aging decades in a span of second real-time. In the beginning, they were soft with light calluses along the knuckles, a ring with a small diamond fitted around her wedding finger. Her nails were trimmed short and there were spots of white on each finger caused by some trauma to the nail. Her fingers were slender, however disproportionate to her thick palms ("the palms of a working woman," Holy would say). The lines running across her palms all pointed to signs of good fortune: a wonderful love life, prosperity, and excellent health. Just by looking at her hands, he could tell that she was a caring person. There was a mysterious quality to them that was comforting to all she graced, which explained why everyone was so naturally drawn to his mother. Men and women alike romantically, platonically, would fall for Holy; they simply wanted to be in her orbit, hoping for a chance to be touched by her again. She was a healer through and through.

As seconds ticked by, Holy's hands changed. Liver spots spattered the back of her hand like paint, no longer were they able to hold themselves straight, constantly bent as if she were prepared to type. Wrinkles -due to roughly washing her hands- trailed across her thin, frail, bluish skin. They shook sometimes too fiercely that Holy was unable to hold silverware to feed herself, but other times, they were as stable as a surgeons. Her nails were thick, coarse, and unpleasant to look at, as they had small dips in them from her anxious habit to rub her nail bed. Years of the same monotonous action, morphed her nails to have permanent dents in them. One quality that remained no matter the age or wear was the ability of pure comfort. Even as her hands became more and more petrified, they were still warm hands that offered calmness to one's mind. Kira wished, now more than ever, that her hands could provide some peace to her own consciousness.

His mother's hand slipped away from his vision, and Kyo's hand replaced them. Scars and calluses festered on her skin, and frankly, they were rather ugly in Kira's opinion. Some were formed as a kid when Kyo would trip and catch herself with her hands; some were self inflicted during her teens as she watched her mother slowly lose her sense of self to the point that she could no longer recognize Kyo. Kyo was always someone who never feared danger, allowing her to stray into many treacherous situations due to her recklessness.

As Kira was dying, he wished he had paid more attention to his sister as she grew older. Their age difference and Kira's general personality already separated the siblings. And his job required him to be out on the sea in places without phone signals, leaving his sister alone to be with a husk of a mom who was forgetting she was a mother at all. Every time Kira returned from a voyage, Kyo had a new scar on her hand -sometimes they were fresh and pink, others aged a bit and dark in color. Kira, being the medical professional that he is, gifted Kyo with scar creams and hand masks, but she rarely used them. It was clear that she didn't want help; she wanted to be in pain, wanted to hurt. This saddened and irritated Kira simultaneously, and his final memory of Kyo's hands was them scribbling her signature to change her last name for her protection.

Replacing his sister's hands was a pair of disgusting hands from a man no less repulsive . Ojiro Sasame's hands started off normal (well, normal compared to the current state of his hands). They were large, lumbering, and touched everything in sight. His hands appeared swollen compared to the rest of the man's body, as if his hands had been stung thousands of times. His fingers were meaty sausages with thick, ashy calluses surrounding them -a log encrusted with years of volcanic ash. They made Kira uncomfortable to be perfectly honest. Everything about this man bothered him to some extent, so much to the point that when Oijiro consumed his own fingers, no empathy was felt in Kira. His hands surprisingly looked better lacking fingers; at least they were more interesting to look at. Whenever Kira saw them, he could not help but become overwhelmed with pride. It was he who convinced this putrefying man to eat his fingers, to destroy the only way for him to caress things which didn't belong to him. In Kira's eyes, it was a favor to society to have Ojiro ingest his fingers; no longer would he able to sexually harass women or pettily steal from the elderly.

When the disfigured hands finally faded away from his mind, Kira was relieved as Karera Sakunami's hands materialized in their wake. A blurring filter hung over them, as Kira was the least familiar with them. Her hands were always holding something -a phone, a book, a writing utensil, money, a drink, a hairbrush, a random rock she liked. Karera herself proclaimed that without something in her hands, she felt nearly naked. Despite her hands appearing rough, they were surprisingly soft to the touch. It fascinated Kira that hands could look so knobbly, so unnatural on a woman's body, yet simultaneously so silken . He always intended on asking what moisturizer (if any) she used.

There was one thing Kira could distinctly remember about Karera's wrists: they were rather bony, her pisiform bone protruding grossly, as if it were trying to break through her skin. It was most likely created by some wrist injury that never got properly treated, but god, was it sickening. The skin over the bone was stretched out and paler than the surrounding skin, appearing as though it could tear at any moment. It made Kira want to dissect her wrist and hand area to diminish his medical mind which was filled to the brim with curiosity over her abnormality. It was a shame that now, as he laid dying, Kira finally felt some interest in Karera, who had been an annoyance to him since they've met.

Finally, as Kira felt his body numbing and his vision swaying, Josefumi's hands appeared in his head. Kira recalled Josefumi saying he hated his hands because they resembled his mom's too much down to the matching freckles on their pinkies. Josefumi's hands were nearly symmetrical, his fingers lining up perfectly if he held his hands flat against each other. Even the wrinkles on his palms were similar, with only a fragment of difference between them. Green and purple veins faintly ran along his hands like delicate vines. The biggest difference between Josefumi's two hands were his thumb prints being two different patterns -a whirlpool on his right hand and a loop on the left. In all of Kira's twenty-seven years of life, this was the first time he had ever met someone with two different fingerprints. It somehow elevated Josefumi's hands higher than others in Kira's eyes; a unique quality that was more appealing than repulsive.

There was only one occasion where they had touched hands: a quick ten seconds where Josefumi compared the length of their hands to each other to see whose were bigger, but those ten seconds stirred something in Kira. Kira, a man who loathed the thought of touching others hands (as they were most likely uncleaned and didn't have the right to touch his own well-kept, beautiful hands), was not minded by this small touch between him and Josefumi. SInce living together, Josefumi's hand hygiene had increased to nearly Kira's standards, and remarkably, he actually listened to Kira's advice on how to maintain perfect hands. For reasons unknown to Kira, in this moment, as he was bleeding profusely and his vision continued to blur and darken, he wanted to tell Josefumi how nice his hands were.

This urge allowed for Kira to flip over on his stomach and crawl to where he last saw Josefumi. Smoke and fire were already distracting his worsened vision, and Kira was unable to utter words, his mouth feeling like it was stuffed with cotton. The pain in his neck and skull started to fester throughout every cell in his body, rendering him from continuing forward. Releasing themselves from the boat, Kira's hands shook immensely. Hot blood poured from the base of his skull, pooling around his chest. His top clung to his skin, peeling away from the boat with every intake of air. The static sensation smoldered Kira's brain, transforming it to slush as it congealed against his skull. Even with his body and mind failing him, Kira was still able to sense that death was imminent. Every beat of his heart furthered the bleeding from his body and only served to strain the muscle as it desperately tried to engulf itself in blood. Even with his wondrous stand and intelligence, he was just a human and a human body can't produce enough blood in time for Kira to survive.

As narcissistic and odd this was in the moment, Kira just desired to look at his own magnificent hands. With the remnants of his fading vision, he stared at the things that have given him so much in his life. His hands allowed him to use his stand, they allowed him to become a surgeon, they allowed him to care for Holy as she did for him as a child. His hands were not only physically things of beauty, but their very existence, with their ability to perform such a range of complex actions, was glorious. Sadly, as tears began to swell in one eye, his hands in his current state seemed like something a demon would possess. Blood stained his flesh and caked into the lines on his hand. His perfect hands were soiled by his own blood. His blood was spilt by his own stand. His own stand did that action because Kira commanded it to. It was Kira who had ruined his hands by injuring himself. An calming but overwhelming sensation washed over Kira; no doubt it was from death's hand stroking his hair and whispering words of longing, but it was also the realization that it was his fault. It was Kira's fault that this happened. It was no one else but his own fault, and he found some indescribable emotion from this fact. Peace? Acceptance? Anger? Regret? Guilt? Happiness? Kira wasn't sure, but he was sure of the fact that he was growing so very tired and death's murmurs sounded so nice right now. So very nice.


End file.
